There has been substantial research in the area of preventing or repairing damage to the central nervous system. Certain drugs, such as brimonidine and various beta-adrenergic blocking agents, have been accepted as neuroprotective drugs that can protect the central nervous system from acute ischemia and crush trauma in humans. Evidence now shows that at least some of the drugs can stabilize, reinforce or even regenerate neurotubules within central or peripheral neurons of a human nervous system to prevent or regenerate damage caused by, for instance, direct crush injury.
Research and testing of such neuroprotective and/or neuroregenerative drugs can be problematic due to the difficulty in performing actual tests prospectively on human subjects. Traditionally, research has been done on animals, but this has limited the ability of scientists to develop new drugs, because results in animals do not always correlate with results in humans.
The ability to test neuroprotective or neuroregenerative drugs on humans would provide researchers with an additional tool that would accelerate the development of drugs for a wide variety of neurological problems. For example, research is being done and there is hope for drugs that will protect and repair nerves damaged in, for example, compression fractures of the spine. The ability to test such drugs on human subjects would also aid in the research into drugs that could negate the neurological damage due to strokes or neuralapostosis in which nerves send self-destruct signals subsequent to being damaged. There is a great need for drugs which are able to slow or stop such neurological damage.
It would be advantageous to determine a common procedure or occurrence that produces readily measurable but clinically insignificant damage to the human central nervous system to facilitate testing of such drugs or other treatments.